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Dance constitutes a true recapturing of... freedom and childish play.

Agnes de Mille

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Agnes de Mille
Age: 88 †
Born: 1905
Born: September 18
Died: 1993
Died: October 6
Ballet Dancer
Ballet Master
Choreographer
Dancer
Theatrical Director
Harlem
New York
Play
Childish
Constitutes
Dance
Freedom
True

More quotes by Agnes de Mille

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I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.
Agnes de Mille
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The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously.
Agnes de Mille
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Ballet technique never becomes easy, it becomes possible
Agnes de Mille
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No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
Agnes de Mille
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One of the good things about my having some recognition is that I can do something for the people I think ought to have more and correct some of the matters fate fails to take care of.
Agnes de Mille
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Many other women have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion.
Agnes de Mille
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A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better than a good head.
Agnes de Mille
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I learned three important things in college-to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface and fifteen minutes. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.
Agnes de Mille
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Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.
Agnes de Mille
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We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
Agnes de Mille
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I studied the way I danced- to the point of dropping.
Agnes de Mille
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Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille
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Find the passion. It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative. I would go so far as to say you can't do it without that passion.
Agnes de Mille
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I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night's sleep the second kills.
Agnes de Mille
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If you want to understand a nation, look at its dances and listen to its folk songs - don't pay any attention to its politicians.
Agnes de Mille
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To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
Agnes de Mille
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Dancing is such a despised and dishonored trade that if you tell a doctor or a laywer you do choreography he'll look at you as if you were a hummingbird. Dancers don't get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.
Agnes de Mille
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The practice mirror is to be used for the correction of faults, not for a love affair, and the figure you watch should not become your dearest friend.
Agnes de Mille
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There is something fearfully strengthening about cutting free even if the ties bandage the heart itself.
Agnes de Mille
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Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
Agnes de Mille